Bitcoin developers get much closer to implementing Smart contracts which are considered the most complicated part of the upgrade, onto the bitcoin protocol as the team overcame the biggest hurdle in the Schnorr/Taproot upgrade as we read further in the Bitcoin latest news.
The Bitcoin developers get closer to implementing smart contracts on the protocol as they merged Schnorr’s improvement proposal BIP-340 with Bitcoin’s master library. The soft fork is the next big update to Bitcoin after SegWit since the launch in 2017. The update will be backward compatible so the usage will depend on the demand from miners and users. The coding expert Pieter Wuille merged the support for Schnorr signatures to BTC while the Taproot merger and the soft fork update are the main steps for smart contract implementation on the Bitcoin network.
secp256k1 now has an experimental module for Schnorr signatures (BIP-340). Pull request #558 by @n1ckler has just been merged after 558+1 comments by many many reviewers. 🎉
— Tim Ruffing (@real_or_random) September 11, 2020
The merger in the protocol’s master library marks a huge milestone for the core development team. The leading BTC developer Nicolas Dorier described it as the most complicated part of the process:
“With that behind us, I expect the rest of the Taproot will follow smoothly.”
Dorrier already developed a simple smart contract using BIP340 and bet 1 BTC on the outcome of the US presidential elections with Chris Stewart. The smart contract functionality means that Bitcoin will have the same capabilities as other blockchains like EOS, Ethereum, and TRON. The Schnorr/Taproot soft fork will expand Bitcoin’s functionality extremely which means that there will be increased privacy, multi-sig applications, scaling, and better transaction speed as well. BTC developer Sanket said:
“What Segwit is to lightning network (LN) compares with what schnorr/taproot is to multi-sig applications.”
According to Sanket, the next step in the upgrade will be the Taproot pull request merger after the soft fork. The decision will be left to miners and network demand that will choose how to run Schnorr/Taproot for smart contracts on the Bitcoin network or go on with the current version of the protocol.
In our recent Bitcoin news, we reported that Bitcoin Engineers found a major blockchain vulnerability that is now fixed but could lead to entire systems of nods being shut down. The hackers never took advantage of this bug in the past but the bug could have led eventually to hackers shutting down entire networks.
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